I ran Fiasco twice at Go Play Northwest, and Matthew Gagan ran it once (much respect for Matthew Gagan). I don't have the sand to write up both my games right now, but here are the set-ups. The first group chose the Suburbia playset:

The Klingon sword did come into play, but not in the predictable manner of Klingon swords. Here's the table during play:


And the second group chose The Ice:

This game ended with two of the characters humping in a giant tractor-bus while a third orchestrated the blowing up of said bus. We played the same scene from the killer's POV, and then from the lovers, the latter interspersed with little callbacks - it was great.

If you played in either session, I hope you'll chime in with your thoughts. If you played in Matthew's game, which was set in the 1880's boomtown, what the hell went down? All I know is that it involved a mountain howitzer and some opium. Here's a photo:

Cool, sounds par for the course. I hope you guys had fun!

1930's noir, LA during prohibition.

A brother-sister, both criminals. Brother is a pimp, one of his ex-prostitutes is trying to go "legit" and runs a burlesque theatre. She's deep in debt and favours, and her lawyer is using the theatre to get dirt on the rich and powerful.

Her lawyer is also working cons with the sister, and the theatre is their next target.

... things go about as well as you would expect.

There was betrayal and mayhem, although only one person took it to the face from a double-barreled shotgun, and he wasn't a PC (bartender at the theatre).

We had a bit of a disconnect between the way the character arcs were heading, and the epilogues that were presented by the rules, but we were able to make things work with a little creative interpretation.

It was kinda neat because it ended up with no one having a "bad" ending - technically, we all did well - the lawyer is still running scams and blackmailing important people, the pimp and prostitute are running the burlesque theatre together, and the con artist sister had skipped town with a boatload of cash.

But scratching the surface of that, we had the lawyer who just hated himself, and you just knew would have a bad end after blackmailing the wrong someone. The pimp and the prostitute who just can't, despite themselves, break out of their abusive cycle. And the most positive personal outcome - the con artist, is free and clear with a ton of money, but has betrayed her family, is completely alone, and can never go back.

Very dark. Not so much the "caper gone wrong" feel to it - no one (important) died, and the caper actually went off, but grim, grim downward spirals for all the characters.

James

I'll just talk about the game I facilitated, though I really enjoyed playing Tyler Wright, ex-felon and Tire King employee in the first game and I think that game went better with Jason's direction.

Not having read the rules, I wouldn't call this a proper playtest of the game. I've read the rules since and there is some direction and emphasis I neglected when explaining the game procedures. Everyone was a pleasure to play with and I enjoyed the game, but there were a couple rocky spots. We also made some creative choices early on that we had to sort of muscle past, kind of like in improv where someone adds something that is out of left field but you soldier on; no ret-con'ing!

We ended up with two Locations rather than two Needs, something that is suggested by the text for four players and probably would have been a stronger option facilitating play. We talked about who our Need, "to get even with a rival," might apply to and came up with a couple possibilities based on the characters and their relationships but we left it open before we started play, which was, I think, also not ideal. Good player instincts quickly had all the characters needing things from one another but I think it would have been better if we'd quickly established exactly who the rivals were AND the nature of the past terrible deed that needed evening up.

As Ryan said, it was mostly a heist story where none of the players end up with the take. Ping's character Liam wasn't even a part of the heist and she included the completely awesome (and obvious-in-a-good-way for the genre) narration of Liam intercepting a bullet with the cash box and having the money fly everywhere at the abandoned mine meet-up.

The mountain Howitzer never went off. I could just hear the movie audience going, "Aww Man! What was up with that Howitzer in all the close-ups?!? I totally thought someone was going to get their head taken off with that thing!" The Howitzer was a famous one from the Civil War era displayed, bizarrely, outside one of two rival churches in town. Liam was obsessed with it and eventually stole it because it raised the profile of the rival church above his own where he volunteered.

Ping and maybe Ryan had some questions and concerns about the "game" aspect of the giving dice away, trying to collect one color or the other, and the influence of that "game" relative to the needs of the narrative in a given scene and overall. I couldn't offer my interpretation of design intent at the time, not having read the rules. And now that I have read the rules, I don't want to put words in their mouths. Maybe they can provide clarity for you here or privately.

I had some cognitive dissonance reconciling the aftermath roll for one or two of the characters relative to the ingame fiction in the last couple scenes. It felt like some pretty extended montages were needed to get the character that seemed like they were going to come out on top to the completely horrible fate that the dice mandated. Depending on your sense of "Cohen justice" you might want a truly amoral character to come out on top and the lovelorn bystander to be hacheted to death. The dice may or may not cooperate. Which is fine, and appropriate to the genre; it's just that getting from "Z" (where the story seemed to be going at the "end") to the Aftermath, may want some additional text support and suggestions.

I'd like to play this game a second (and third and fourth) time with the same players, or to try it a first time with my regular group that I've played with a lot. I can see how the resolution could work very smoothly among people who've played together several times. In our session, maybe owing to my poor direction, we tended to talk out several possiblities for what might happen before settling on one - worried about stepping on strangers' preferences, etc.

Anyway, I really enjoyed meeting and playing with Ping, Ryan and Paul. Thanks for your patience and enthusiasm. Even though I've been a GM more than two-thirds of the time in my thirty-year RP'ing "career," that was actually my first time facilitating a con game! Running it without reading the rules may mean I am an ambitious person with poor impluse control. Hopefully it was a complete Fiasco! ;)

Posted By: moleculo

Posted By: blankshieldVery dark. Not so much the "caper gone wrong" feel to it - no one (important) died, and the caper actually went off, but grim, grim downward spirals for all the characters.

Nice summary, James - you got it just right.

"Holly"

Yeah, I was thinking about it some more yesterday, and it occured to me that it felt less like a Coen brothers movie, and more like a Frank Miller comic. Everyone "won", and we all got to appreciate how much that totally sucked for them.

Posted By: nemomemeWe talked about who our Need, "to get even with a rival," might apply to and came up with a couple possibilities based on the characters and their relationships but we left it open before we started play, which was, I think, also not ideal. Good player instincts quickly had all the characters needing things from one another but I think it would have been better if we'd quickly established exactly who the rivals were AND the nature of the past terrible deed that needed evening up.

I saw this when I played as well. Leaving Details to get fleshed out in play seems to always weaken them, in one case in our game to the point of 100% neglect; getting everyone on the same page with them before Scene 1 conversely seems to make them feel more like part of the furniture of the fiction, something you need to come back to again and again.

Just out of curiosity, how much did you get out of your double Locations? My group had trouble getting ours to really pop in our first game; the Location (hotel room) was really just one set among many, whereas our single Need was enough to drag everyone in the r-map straight on to Hell.

(In our second game, the apartment above the laundromat was the main place where Bad Things happened — in the best Fiasco style, that was because we always knew we could find the down-on-her-luck, in-debt-to-the-mob, loser of a failed meth dealer there, and beat her up/extract money from her/steal her meth/get sexually manipulated by her — and its uselessness as her refuge was extremely poignant.)

Many, many thanks to Matthew for facilitating Fiasco so we could try it out. We had a fun time and a good story. I like the story and character seeding, and we picked the Western setting which worked pretty well for us though I agree with Ryan that picking the suburbs would have probably been easier and served us better. The suburbs are more familiar to us as players and with any historical setting there's always the added challenge of keeping the anachronisms out which may be an unecessary burden when trying a game out at a con. I completely cop to making the howitzer the subject of a church squabble. It was out of left field and we certainly did have to muscle throught this particular plot point. Thanks, guys!

I did have some questions about the game, but I wanted to read the rules first before commenting. So having done that, here are some thoughts:

GAMEPLAY: We didn't follow the rules that say that you should make dice decisions as your character, not player. I think had we done this, it would have changed the game a lot. Our decisions were mostly based on what was good for the story because that's natural for story gaming. This is something that should be made clear up front in the rules and not buried in the middle.

Perhaps as a result of this, I didn't feel the dice mechanics enforced or supported the "fiasco" genre and we players just had to collectively develop a good, crazy story on our own and picked dice accordingly and as a group. Additionally, because none of us knew what was on the Aftermath table, the dice in front of us seemed pretty arbitrary and I suspected that when people were choosing to give out dice after resolving, they were basing it more on evenly distributing the dice among players more than anything else.

I would like to play it again with the clear intention of making dice decisions from the POV of my character to get a true feel for the game, but I wonder if it would be better if the dice mechanics helped mix it up or generate the fiasco narration in some more direct way.

Questions about dice mechanics:
* If picking dice is supposed to be from the character POV, then I would expect that the player will always pick white dice if they can for a positive outcome. BUT - if the player is collecting black dice because having all black dice gives their character a better outcome on the Aftermath table (a meta-game concept the character really knows nothing about) how does it work that the character would want negative outcomes for purely for meta-game reasons? This also applies for giving dice to other characters - I want to give my brother positive outcomes, but maybe he needs more black dice for a better Aftermath roll.

* How do the players decide what color die to give to the current player if they disagree? For instance, my character wants his brother to get the money, but Ryan's character wants it for himself so doesn't want the brother to get it. What to do? We never disagreed because the best thing for the story always seemed clear, but if it's really from the character's POV...

TILT: Matthew and Paul had the largest number of black or white dice so they chose the Tilt elements while Ryan and I took a break. When we came back, we kept playing so we didn't select Tilt items together as is suggested in the rules. We also didn't pause and discuss how the Tilt would integrate into the game, where the game was going, how it was going etc. As a result, I don't think we integrated the Tilt elements explicitly, but they just sort of fit into where we were already sort of going.

AFTERMATH: For my character, I could and would have been happy to narrate anything on the Aftermath list, good, bad or otherwise, so I felt very indifferent towards my pile of dice. In fact I ended up with a 1, which is "disaster" according to the rules and so my character had a horrible tragic ending. Great!

Matthew's point that the dice mechanics don't link the story to the aftermath as well as it could is well taken because my character came out of the story riding high and so we had to narrate a seemingly unrelated fall from grace into drug addiction and death.

I hadn't read any guidance about how exactly the Tilt works, or how it should be discussed, but they seemed to fit the way our game was pretty clearly headed.

For whatever it's worth, it felt a bit to me like our game had already had some serious complications and "tilt" prior to the dice being half gone. Our last few scenes took place sequentially in a matter of minutes in story-time, with all the characters present in the unraveling disaster. I was concerned when Paul (or was it Ryan?) called for the heist early on, but I recalled a lot of great heist movies where the heist takes place right at the beginning or even *before* the beginning of the movie with the rest of the movie being about the resulting complications associated with "honor among theives"...

I'll have to go back and look at the text to see what it says about the Tilt relative to the game's pacing leading up to the half-dice state...

This is good stuff, keep it coming. One thing I've noticed is that some games peak early (Chris' game did, too), and I have a way to address this as an option. When I play I encourage people to pace it more slowly, more like this:

First die: Establishing character and goals
Second die: Taking decisive action toward goals.
Tilt
Third die: Damage control.
Fourth die: The last hurrah - tying up loose ends, making another run at your goal, getting revenge, etc.

Doesn't always work out that way, and that's fine.

I'll make sure the choice of outcome is clearly defined in the final text. If it still says your decision should be predicated on the character's POV exclusively, that's an artifact. You should metagame the hell out of your choice, whether you are giving a die to someone who established or are resolving for yourself.

It occurred to me, shortly before the Tilt, two white dice in hand, that I should do what I could to re-direct black dice elsewhere. I succeeded in that and ended up with 3 or 4 white dice by largely passing off dice to other players. I came to realize about a couple scenes from the end of the game that the other Players could easily frame my character's death scene. Then what good would all those white dice do? I think all of our characters lived through the mine scene because none of the Players wanted to murder a character.

That said, I had a great time playing the game. Cheers to Matthew for getting us up to speed in short order and organizing a really enjoyable game. Also, Ping, I got your back -- O'Leary brothers for life!